“You look beautiful,” Mr. Walker says, taking my hands and giving me a kiss on both cheeks like he was the Prince of Wales and I should be honored to be in his company. It’s not entirely far off.

The Walker family is an institution in this town, where the median income is four hundred thousand dollars but theirs is far greater. They aren’t the mayor or the owner of the local market chain or the purveyor of the ski-in-ski-out resort a few mountains over, no. But they know all those people. They’re great friends with the mayor and the governor and the vice presidential candidate who lives a half hour away. They have monthly dinners with the lieutenant governor. Douglas golfs with the attorney general and Cheryl organizes three fundraisers a year with the police commissioner’s wife. The chief justice of the Vermont state court is Graham’s godfather. The Walker family is an unbreakable, untouchable institution. And I’m about to join it.

“Thank you, Mr. Walker,” I say. “You look very handsome yourself.” I pretend to fix his tie, as if it was anything but perfectly straight already. I pause when I am supposed to, leaving him just enough of a gap to step in—please, call me Douglas, I’ve told you that. You’re family now. But it never comes. He likes the patriarchal power of it. He’s the head of this family. He gets what he wants. So I call him Doug in my head to spite him. Even though he’ll never know it.

Cheryl is on the other side of the room, standing at the bar and stabbing three olives with a toothpick before drowning them in her vodka martini. “You look lovely, dear,” her prickly voice says, though she has yet to look in my direction once. She’s wearing an off-white frock eerily similar to the jumpsuit I am planning to wear tomorrow. Of course the mother of the groom is wearing white. She always has trouble giving up the spotlight. Mine looks better, of course. Mine is lower cut to show just enough cleavage for Graham’s friends to be jealous, and just enough protruding rib for my friends to be jealous. Hers is a little, well, matronly. Like something on a mannequin at Neiman Marcus.